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Updated: May 28, 2025
"Is anything the matter, my dear child?" asked Mrs Vallance. "You look frightened, and so pale." Mary murmured something about being tired, and crept into her place at the table. "I never like those expeditions to Maskells," continued Mrs Vallance; "you all run about so wildly and excite yourselves so much."
This was partly, perhaps, because his mind was full of a certain project which he wished her to join, and she had scarcely bound him by a solemn promise not to breathe a word to the other children of what she had told him, than he began eagerly: "We're going to spend the day at Maskells to-morrow the whole day. Will Mrs Vallance let you go too?"
We advise East Maskells. I do not suppose there will be any pursuit. They will have no horses ready. Do you understand it?" There was silence a moment; Mr. Buxton could hear Anthony breathing in the darkness. "I do not like it," came the whisper at last; "it seems desperate. A hundred things may happen. And what of Isabel and you?"
This attention consoled Mary a little, and she managed to bear up, but a dulness had fallen over the whole party; Fraulein was still tearful, and Rice cross, so that none of the children were sorry when the wagonette arrived to take them back to Wensdale. To Mary it was the greatest possible relief; she never never wished to see Maskells again.
Maskells was a deserted house standing near the high-road between the White House and Dorminster; it had once been a place of some consequence, and still had pleasant meadows round it, sloping down to a river at the back; but the garden and orchard were tangled and neglected much more interesting, the children thought, than if they had been properly cared for.
And as all this flooded in upon him, incoherently but overpoweringly, he turned and laughed loud with joy. They had nearly come to an end of the flat by now. In front of them rose the high black mass of trees where safety lay; somewhere to the right, not a quarter of a mile in front, just off the road, lay East Maskells.
Anthony and Isabel had returned a little later from East Maskells, and they too had dressed early. Isabel threw a lace shawl over her head, and betook herself too to the alley; and there she turned a corner and almost ran into her host. It was, as Mary had said, a God-made opportunity. Neither time nor place could have been improved.
He quieted her, and went to the door in the yard that opened on to the field-path to East Maskells, unbarred it and stepped through. There was a dry ditch on his left, where nettles quivered in the stirring air; and a heavy clump of bushes rose beyond, dark and impenetrable. Mr. Buxton stared straight at these a moment or two, and then out towards East Maskells.
Her mind was so full of this as the day went on that everything else seemed like a sort of dream; she heard Mrs Vallance talking to her, and answered, but so absently that her mother looked at her in surprise. "She is certainly very much over-tired," she said to herself; "I always knew that Maskells was not a place for the children, and I shall tell Mrs Chelwood so."
Mary was delighted, for Maskells was the most charming place possible to spend a day in, and the prospect of going there made her forget for a time the one subject which had lately filled her mind herself.
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